It’s been a bit of time without an update, so it seemed like a nice little Saturday morning to laze in bed a bit longer and write a blog post. I haven’t been as active online lately, but I’ve definitely been keeping busy! Especially since the weather has been getting nicer (and then worse, but then nice again – Seattle likes to play hard-to-get) I’ve been feeling more energized and motivated lately, which is always a nice shift. You can feel it in the air.

Wedding: Luckily since my wedding is still over a year away, nothing feels very stressful or rushed yet. I’m hoping I can space things out enough to keep it that way. Joe and I finally decided on a venue (which is probably why I am so much less stressed about this now – that part was killer) and we’re working on getting save-the-dates made. We also asked my adorable cousin to be our flower girl, so I’m feeling good about our progress.

Writing: I’m about 7,000 words into my Camp Nano project, which is also the new book I am throwing myself into after deciding to put down the last one. This is not nearly as much progress as I was hoping at this point, but I am still proud of myself for continuing to work on it, and I’m hoping to keep up a regular pace even after Camp NaNo is over. My goal is to have a first draft of this book done by NaNoWriMo proper this year, which feels reasonable to me. That gives me 6 months.

I’ve still been updating #wordbound each week with new prompts, even though I’m a little behind in actually doing the prompts myself. I’m going to get myself back on track soon, and I’ve been so thankful for the folks continuing to write their stories each week for the prompts. You guys are great.

Cosplay: While Emerald City Comic Con ended up being somewhat of a non-event for my friends I with regard to cosplay (just 2 rewears) we were planning to go all out for SakuraCon. This year was the 20th anniversary of the con, so many cosplayers chose to go retro anime with their cosplays. We jumped on board this train, finally bringing to fruition a long time goal of cosplaying as the colorful and eccentric Amazoness Quartet from Sailor Moon.

I’m not sure I’ve ever worked harder on a costume than this one, and the days leading up to the con, it’s all we did after work. My living room was a disaster of ribbons, hair wefts, and fake roses.

And then, on Friday, I started getting a tickle in my throat. I tried to ignore it, but there it was.

I woke up on Saturday feeling miserable. But I couldn’t let my quartet down, so I groggily put on my wig cap, glued on my fake eyelashes, and affixed the pieces of my tiny costume to my body. And guys – I looked fabulous. But I felt like death.

We managed to walk around the con for about two hours (which was about enough time to film a segment for a cosplay music video, go to the Sailor Moon meetup and do our personal photo shoot) before I had to give up and go home. I did not see even an inch of the show floor. And I didn’t end up going back on Sunday (when I planned to wear a new Lolita dress). I absolutely adore SakuraCon, so I was pretty disappointed, but I was so sick. Now we have to figure out somewhere else to wear these costumes because we definitely did not get enough use out of them.

Work: My job has been keeping me pretty busy lately as well – and as usual I really can’t say much. This is one of the most difficult parts of this job, truly. I am so used to candidly sharing tidbits about my life, but for some reason, I always end up working on projects at Microsoft that are tented, unannounced, or confidential. I still work in HoloLens-land, which is exciting. I’m also shifting focus a bit toward Microsoft’s new mixed reality initiative, which you can read more about here.

Whenever I can share cool stuff about what I am doing at work, I promise, I will. For now, just trust me – I’m surrounded by awesome technology every day and I feel so lucky. Also, you can follow this Instagram account my team launched if you’d like. It’s gonna be cool.

Life: My personal initiative to go to the gym at least twice a week took a tiny bit of a backseat because I had to take a week off to finish my costume… and then I got sick, but I already started making up for it by walking around the lake I live by yesterday with Joe. And I’m going to pick it back up again next week when I can breathe normally again.

Beyond that, I’ve been reading a lot – I read a whole book while I was sick, and Goodreads tells me I am something like 10 books ahead of my reading goal for the year. I specifically set myself a pretty low reading goal this year (only 30 books) because I didn’t want reading to become a stress in any way. And now I’m blowing past the goal, which feels nice!

I also went to Disneyland a couple of weeks ago with my girlfriends! Jenn had never been, so we needed to right a wrong. We went for two days (one park each day) and I’m pretty impressed with how thorough we were. We hit just about every ride we wanted to, saw the Mainstreet Electrical Parade, the Frozen show and World of Color, hit up two Disney dining experiences and participated in the food and wine fest. It was a solid weekend.

Standard obligatory Disney jailhouse photo-op.

This was the day we decided to disneybound every dress Belle wears in the new live action film. Of course, Gaston was the first person we ran into. Typical.

Eia and I fulfilled a lifelong need to disneybound Anna and Elsa (and seriously, this dress has been hanging in my closet for this sole purpose for YEARS). What better place to immortalize our perfect outfits than in front of the #bluewall?

It’s funny – when I was in middle school, I went to California Adventure with my friend Stephanie. While we ran around losing our minds on rides, her mom and aunt spent most of the day sitting in the Mendocino Terrace Wine Tasting area, and we thought this was the stupidest way to spend your time at a theme park. Well… my life has come full circle, because we spent at least two hours there on Sunday, mostly because our feet hurt and also wine is delicious.

We also ate at the Blue Bayou, which was a first for me as well!

We mostly spent our time shopping, because shopping is great and also Disneyland does that thing where the gift shops are mostly the same but you really have to see them all to see everything. And we decided to be completionists.

I got sick of wearing that blue Elsa dress about halfway through the day on Sunday so I switched into an entirely new outfit of things I had purchased that day. #noregrets

Overall it was an amazing weekend of pin trading, spending all our money, eating delicious food and wishing we could do weekends like this more often. I had a great time with my lady friends and I can’t wait for our next getaway.

Looking forward to summer and some other trips I have coming up with both my and Joe’s families, and I’ll keep updating this blog to keep you all posted on what I’m up to, since I’ve been a little quieter online lately!

While in LA last week, my friends and I attended “Disneyland Day” for VidCon – which is like any other normal day at Disneyland, except the park is swarming with YouTubers. Rather than donning my official gray VidCon tee like many others, my friends and I decided to Disneybound:

This was my very first time Disneybounding and I decided I wanted to go villain. I chose Cruella de Vil; mostly on account of finding these adorable polka dot shorts. The puppy earrings were actually just white dog earrings I found at Claire’s (by walking in and asking the girl working to “show me whatever dog stuff they had”) that I drew black spots on with a sharpie. I tucked in a slouchy red shirt, grabbed some other black and white accessories and wa-la! If it doesn’t scare you, no evil thing will!

I never got a full picture of all my friends and I in costume, but we had among us a Dumbo, Christopher Robin, Scuttle, The Queen of Hearts and Sophie from Howl’s Moving Castle. I love dressing up, so getting to do so, subtly, on a normal day is something I am all about.

Who should I Disneybound as next? Or, if you’ve done it yourself, show me pictures in the comments section!

That is a tweet from Sunday; one that perfectly encapsulates the weekend I’ve had. Weekends include Mondays when we’re filming. We’ve now completed 18 full days of shooting for Season 2 of my web series Job Hunters (wow!), and I both can’t believe 1. how far we’ve come and 2. how much there is left to do. This was actually our last weekend at the house for this season, and it’s a little bittersweet. I’m going to miss this view.

This past weekend was a LOT of fun, and we shot one of my favorite scenes in all of Season 2. That’s the good news… the bad news is that I am exhausted and bruised and ready for a good long week of sleeping and watching anime – right in time for VidCon!

On that note, rather than slippers, I’ve got my party shoes packed – because I know how crazy VidCon is going to be. I know I will be much too tired and busy to put together outfits while I am there, so I actually packed pre-planned outfits, which is something I very rarely do.

Knowing how many industry parties there are, I realized I needed a couple of fancier outfits, which brought me to packing phase two as I swapped out denim shorts for dresses. I also grudgingly took one of my three pairs of comfortable sandals out of my suitcase and replaced them with heels in packing phase three, and today consists of making sure the recent clothing swaps even make sense. We’ll call that phase four. Oh, and I’ll probably need things other than clothes while I’m down there, right?

Other VidCon essentials:

Pajamas you’re comfortable running around a hotel in

Business cards

Bathing suit, just in case (Modcloth.com is having a great sale right now, 25% off swimwear if you use the code “SWIM25”!

I’ve also got good walking shoes for DISNEYLAND DAY, and a special outfit I’ve been working on for Disneybounding. That will be a blog post in itself, so keep an eye out for that. 😀 Any guesses on who I might dress up as? Is anyone else doing Disneybound while at VidCon?

There’s less than 24 hours now before I leave, so this will likely be my last post before leaving for California. Look out for outfit of the day posts from VidCon, wrap ups of the best events, and if you’re attending as well – please come say hi!

Kristina is a book obsessed, novel-writing, costume-making, project managing lover of all things cute. This blog is a snapshot of a married girl working in the tech industry and living her best nerdy life.